Lawless couldn't recall ever seeing the coroner upset, at all.

Brouchard noticed Jensen for the first time.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have acted in such an unprofessional manner. It's just that they really got me riled."

Then, heating up a little again, "Samuel Deavers hasn't worked in a lab in twenty years, yet he thinks he can come in here and tell me how to run mine!"

Lawless said, "What was in the evidence transport he was carrying?"

Brouchard looked at Lawless with dagger-eyes. "A sample he collected from the woman killed by the canal yesterday. I called to tell them I was sending another DNA sample I wanted rushed when Deavers himself comes on the phone. He has the nerve to tell me not to touch the body until he gets here, that he wants to collect the sample because they can't believe what they're seeing is coming off human corpses."

"Bastards!" Lawless said, raising his voice a little, hoping to show some solidarity. "You should have thrown them the hell out when they got here."

"I'm sorry," Brouchard apologized again. "I'm sure you didn't come here to listen to my problems." He tried to smile. "How can I help you?"

"Well, we have a meeting with Modesto PD this afternoon and we were hoping to get a brief summary about the canal victims' wounds and the DNA."

Brouchard was staring at Jensen. It took a second for Lawless to figure out why: he always worked alone, didn't think he'd ever come to the coroner's office with someone else in tow.

"Um, Dr. Brouchard, this is Deputy Sandra Jensen. Deputy Jensen, this is Dr. Brouchard, the county coroner."

Brouchard said, "Please, call me Larry. Nice to meet you, Deputy." He stood and went to shake her hand.

Jensen shook hands and said, "Nice to officially meet you, Larry. I've seen you around but I don't think we've ever met."

He turned to Lawless. "Brief, huh? Autopsy report too long?"

"Just a summary to give Modesto PD. I'll make them eat it after they read it if you want."

Brouchard frowned. "You know better than to say something like that. Once it's in print, anyone can get their hands on it."

He returned to his desk and sat, started shuffling through papers, looking for something. "I'll do it as a favor to you, Danny. But you have to promise it won't find its way into the hands of that Bee reporter."

"What Bee reporter?"

"The one that wrote the article in today's paper."

Lawless remembered his telephone conversation with Tommy Wu. "I talked to a reporter a couple of days ago. He knew more than he should have, but not enough for anything more than a small story. And that should have been in yesterday's paper, not today's."

Brouchard found what he was looking for and glanced up. "I didn't see anything in yesterday's paper, but it was all over the front page today. Don't you read the paper?"

Lawless looked worried. "Sometimes. Usually." He looked around the office for the paper.

Brouchard frowned. "How do know what's going on if you don't read the paper?"

"You have it here?"

Brouchard pointed to the floor, by a side chair.

Jensen grabbed it and unfolded the front page. The headline read "Gruesome Deaths By Canals." The tag line said "4th victim in 3 days found brutally murdered in Elk Park."

"Swell," Lawless said.

Brouchard said, "I'll have Janice fax it to you before lunch. Take the paper if you want."

"Before lunch?" Lawless said, looking at his watch. "It's already eleven forty-two."

"I usually don't get lunch until one, but I'll try to get it done by twelve-thirty. It should only take me ten minutes. I just have to cut-and-paste from the autopsy drafts."

Lawless nodded at Jensen for them to go. "Thanks Larry. I owe you one."

"You owe me two," Brouchard answered from his desk.

"Right," Lawless said, no clue what the other one was.

Outside in the car, Jensen read the article out loud. The author was Tommy Wu. All four victims were identified by name - that information had come from the Sheriff Department's spokesperson, Henry Kellerman - and where their remains were found. The story had enough detail that Lawless knew Wu had talked to at least one person who'd worked all four scenes. He could have spoken to more than one, but it wasn't likely. Once you find one blabbermouth, why waste energy looking for another? The information about the remains came from an "unnamed source."

Lawless was named as lead detective on the three county cases, Baskel for the one in Modesto. Lawless was a "no comment," but Baskel had a few things to say, mostly just asking the public for help: if anyone was in the vicinity of Elk Park at approximately twelve noon yesterday and saw something, anything, would they please contact ... blah, blah. At least Baskel didn't give out any real information, which made Lawless's "no comment" look less deceitful. From now on he would refer Wu, or any other reporter, to Kellerman. That was his job, after all.

"Seeing it all written up in the paper like that is scary," Jensen said, after she finished reading the article. "Just think how you would feel if you didn't know anything about it and then you get this" - she rattled the paper - "with your morning coffee. How many people do you think get the paper?"

"I don't know, seventy-five thousand or so. Way less than half of Modesto, but it doesn't matter with a story like this. It's sensational enough that local DJs will talk it up on the radio. They don't know anything more than what's written in the paper, because that's where they get their information, but it spreads the story around. After hearing about it on the radio, a lot of non-subscribers will buy a paper at lunch or after work and the Bee will sell out their whole run. Then, guess what?"

Jensen picked up on the flow. "There'll be another story on the front page tomorrow, won't there?"

"And every day after that until the story stops selling papers."

Lawless looked out the window at a group of teenagers walking by, throwing stones at a telephone pole; three boys trying to impress a girl, about fifteen, dressed not too unlike the women in the club the night before. He shook his head and said, "But the story won't die until the monster dies, or until it decides it doesn't like the taste of the people around here and moves on."

"I'll bet there are a lot of terrified mothers out there," Jensen said. "People getting their heads ripped off. Police finding bloody feet. How could they send their kids off to school or out to play this morning?"

After a moment, Lawless said, "Right now they're thinking there's a pack of crazed lunatics on the loose. School will be out, what, next week? They're probably safer in school than running around the neighborhood, throwing bottles and rocks into the canals, or swimming in them. No matter how concerned they are now, just wait and see what happens if they ever learn the truth."

The more he thought about it, the more he fretted about the possibility of widespread panic. "Think about it. How many people in this town could throw their cat over the back fence and have it land in a canal? I've seen kids waiting for their school bus a stone's throw from one of them. They're everywhere."

"I see someone walking or jogging next to a canal every time I drive by one," Jensen added. Then she turned and looked at him. "We need to warn everyone to stay away from the canals."

"I agree, but we can't be the only ones crying wolf. If we go to the press now, with what we have, they won't believe us."

"So? I bet the paper will print it anyway and people will stay away from the canals. We might save some lives."

"Then again we might not. Half the people will blow town or barricade themselves in their houses, but the other half will run out to the canals with their video cameras, hoping to film the monster and sell it to the eleven o'clock news. We could very well be setting up a buffet table for it."

"Shit," she said, seeing his point.

"Let's talk about it again after the meeting this afternoon, after we see how the Modesto PD guys take it. It would be nice to spread the responsibility around a little, I'm starting to feel crushed."

She looked at him. "Is that all you've been feeling today? Have you felt anything about the creature?"

He shook his head. "Before I fell asleep last night I tried reaching out to it, seeing what I could see. Nothing happened. I just fell asleep. And there's not even been a twinge today. It's like all of a sudden a door's been closed."

"Maybe it's for the better," she said, touching his arm.

"I don't think the fun's over yet. You didn't forget about my dream last night, did you?"

Her hand shot back to her lap. "I had. Until you just reminded me."

The creature had been resting in the cool canal water for an hour. This was the first time it had ventured into this section of the canals owned and operated by the Modesto Irrigation District, so there was a steel grille to bite through. The grille was no match for its teeth, though. Its species had evolved on a planet with metals much harder than steel; it could bite through five inches of the hardest material found on Earth.

Normally it preferred to hunt and feed from the canals in the vast farmlands surrounding Modesto. However, its preference for the quiet, empty land was changing. Last night's successful feeding in town had intrigued it. It had been much more satisfying, both physically and psychically, than all its previous feedings combined. Amplifying a human's emotions while consuming its flesh had been intoxicating.

Merely killing and eating humans was no longer enough, it now wanted terrified and screaming humans it could consume piece-by-piece.

The creature's physical body did not require rest, so it was odd for it to be idle so long. Earlier in the day it had sensed an increase in the flow of psychic energy emitted by the humans. The creature fed on the energy, yet was also intrigued by it.

Now, as it sat in the cool water, it tested different routines to see which might best allow it to profit from the humans' angst. It found a few that seemed promising, one in particular.

Next time it would not take the creature an hour to interpret the humans' emotions.

"Are we ready for the meeting this afternoon?" Jensen asked, ready to stop talking and get moving.

"No. We need to get some stuff from the office, make some copies." Lawless sighed and started the car. "Might as well get that done."

The Sheriff's Department was buzzing when they walked in, despite it being almost lunch. Jensen went off to check in with Sgt. Tingey. Lawless picked up a stack of mail, which he ignored, and several messages: Wu and the sheriff had each called twice, Henry Kellerman once. He threw the ones from Wu in the wastebasket and stared at the two from the sheriff, shaking his head. He shouldn't have messages from the sheriff, the man should have called him on his cell phone. Isn't that why everyone had one?

He knew what Kellerman wanted: an update and a fact sheet. A fact sheet was a one-page summary of a case: what was done to whom, who they think did it, who was working on it, and what progress had been made. It was used to brief the media and to quickly bring other police officers or agencies up to speed on a case so it was an important, and evolving, document; easy to create but a pain to keep up-to-date. Lawless, like most investigators, didn't bother typing them up until someone asked for one. He hadn't created any for the three canal killings but it appeared he would have to now.

He would not write about a monster in the canals, though, at least not yet.

He called Kellerman first, game him an update and promised a fact sheet in an hour.

Then he called the sheriff and apologized for not getting back to him the day before, after Elk Park. The sheriff chewed him out, going on and on so Lawless stopped listening and started working on his fact sheets. The sheriff finally ran out of wind and hung up.

Thirty minutes later the fact sheets were done and he had copies for everyone.

On his way back from the copier, a secretary handed him a fax from Brouchard. It was too wordy of course, filling the entire page in a size-ten font, and wasn't as convincing as he hoped, but it would have to do. At least Brouchard touched on all the evidence, including the strange DNA. He wondered if medical professionals took courses on how to write long, boring, and often incomprehensible reports.

He had the photo lab make copies of the crime scene photo cds and chose several to be printed, ones he thought best showed the wounds as bites. He considered making copies of the tape with Tony Fruega's statement, but decided against it: it wasn't primo evidence. A summary would have to do, maybe from Jensen.

He finished at one and called Jensen: "Lunch?"

"Starved."

"Meet you out front."

In the car, she said, "Ready for the meeting?"

"Yeah. Got everything copied and set to go. We'll wow 'em."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Summarize Fruega's statement, nothing too detailed. 'Just the facts, ma'am,' that kind of thing. Don't offer that he was doped up. Make them pry it out of us."

"Where do I say the interview took place?"

"Don't. Just say something like, 'We took Mr. Fruega's statement at whatever time this morning, and he said blah blah.' "

"I can do that."

On the road, he realized he didn't know where they were headed. "What do you want?"

"A&W?"

A&W was an old-fashioned drive-in restaurant, with carhops on roller skates and trays that hooked onto car windows. They served greasy, somewhat pricey burgers, hot dogs, decent fries, and ice cold draft root beer in frosty mugs. Too warm to eat in the car, they ordered lunch at the dining room counter.

When their food came, Jensen said, "You keep feeding me like this, I'm gonna' get fat."

"You can work it off later," he said, with a straight face.

She blushed, looked around to see if anyone was listening: a small bug-eyed child was staring at her gun.

They finished their food at two, an hour before their meeting at Modesto PD.

"Let's sit outside," Lawless said, pointing to a metal dining table shaded by elm trees. They went outside and sat at the table.

An old man wearing a ragged coat pushed a shopping cart down the sidewalk next to the restaurant, in no apparent hurry. His right foot had a palsy so the toe of his shoe scraped the cement. The cart's right front wheel wobbled and spun in the air. Inside the cart were two large plastic trash bags and a tattered old rolled-up sleeping bag. A light breeze blew the foul smell of an unbathed human, who wore a heavy topcoat in ninety-degree weather, twenty feet to where Lawless and Jensen sat.

"Whew," Jensen said, wrinkling her nose and fanning the air in front of her.

The old man caught the movement, took two or three seconds to recognize her uniform, and shifted into a higher gear, going from snail-pace to turtle-pace. Then, realizing his quickened pace might imply a guilty conscience, he returned to snail-pace. He glanced at the officers out of the corner of his eye, saw them watching him, and quickly turned his head.

Lawless and Jensen laughed, trying their best to do it quietly.

"Where do you think he'll sleep tonight?" Jensen asked.

"Who knows. It's spring now, so maybe in a park or under the bridge."

"He'd never make the bridge by nightfall, fast as he's going."

The man was almost out of sight when a cup of soda and ice flew out the window of a little Kia, hitting him in the legs, soaking his pants and shoes with cold sticky liquid. A young male poked his head out the window and laughed. Then, seeing Jensen, said, "Oh shit!"

His head went back in the car, where he presumably told the driver the cops had seen him douse the homeless man. The Kia blew a stop sign and got t-boned by a pickup doing thirty-five in a twenty-five zone. The impact sent the Kia crashing into the steel pole holding the a&w sign: smoke and steam rose from the crumpled hood and green antifreeze leaked from a cracked radiator, like alien blood.

Lawless looked at his watch. "We have time."